And in the Darkness Bind Them
by Thethuthinnang
Summary: BtVS.LotR. The fire filled her body, her head, and she burned, screaming and screaming and screaming, until she had burned to nothing, and there was no pain.
1. Chapter 1

Sylfaen

Disclaimer: Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Lord of the Rings belong to their respective creators, Joss Whedon and J.R.R. Tolkien.

Note: An answer to jrabbit's "With this ring, I..." Challenge over at Twisting the Hellmouth.

Dead, it was a pathetic pile of skin and bones, nowhere near as unnerving as it had looked when alive.

Strangling the thing had not been pleasant. She wiped her hands on her legs but couldn't quite rub away the nasty feeling. The lake water was stagnant, colder than ice, and almost as slimy as whatever it was that she had just killed, so that her whole body felt nearly as disgusting as her palms. The thing's eyes had been huge and round in the dark, bulging whitely as it choked and finally died, grasping, sinewy limbs beating at her arms, hisses and gurgles and gulping noises swelling the clammy skin against her fingers. The corpse slapped against the rock like a dead fish when she finally dropped it.

She took a deep, steadying breath, swallowed the bile that stung the back of her throat at the smell of dank water and foulness and death, and, preparing to stand, put her hand down into a thick growth of lichen only to feel the chill of metal beneath her fingers.

She scraped it up, picking it out of the fungus, and found that it was a ring.

It was so dark that she couldn't really tell what kind of metal it was. What was this thing doing with a ring? Or, actually, what _had_ it been doing with a ring? No clothes, no anything that she could immediately see but a ring? In the dark, in a...cave?

She dragged herself farther up onto the rock, pulling her legs out of the water with a churning slosh. Parts of her body were beginning to go numb—she was losing feeling in her smallest fingers and toes. That noise, that noise was her teeth, her teeth chattering. The condensation on her nose and cheeks was her breath, blowing back into her face as she exhaled.

The rock was covered in lichen, mold, and fragments of bone that scratched at her like sand. She forced herself to move, to crouch, to rub at her arms and legs, to huddle for warmth.

Everywhere was water. Cold, still, black water, a lake—a lake in the dark, stretching away to every side of her into—into dark and more dark. The air was stale and putrid, stank of slime and filth—but that was from the rock, the corpse, the waste and scum under her feet. The rock under her feet—there wasn't much of it, only a bit of stone rising up out of the water, an island in the middle of the lake in the dark.

She looked up, and saw only black.

_Cave,_ she thought, and knew instinctively, in her bones, that she was underground, that this was a lake and an island below the surface of the world, and a frisson of atavistic fear made her clutch, white-knuckled, at her own arms.

Her right hand clenched into a fist around the ring, the metal growing hot against her flesh.

_What,_ she thought frantically, a trace of panic sharpening her thoughts, panic that was somehow heightened by the frozen smear of her wet hair over her head and face and neck. _What. What. What._

Where was she? What was she doing here? How...had she gotten here?

_Last thing I remember,_ she thought, and closed her eyes, tried to think, tried to see...

Water. Water trickling, dripping, rippling. She opened them again and looked back into the water, stretching her neck out to put her head over the edge.

A lake, a lake of black, cold water, a well beneath the world.

_There,_ she whispered to herself, _I came up out of there._

"There," she rasped, and her voice was so loud that she startled herself into sitting up and from the ceiling she heard a cacophony of thumping wings and high-pitched screams.

Stiffly, with some teeth-gritted effort, she managed to stand. She couldn't feel her toes.

It was too cold. She was either going to move or begin exhibiting second stage hypothermia.

Ten shaky steps, and she came to the opposite end of the island. There, pulled up onto the rock, was a small, ramshackle boat.

The closed fist of her right hand seemed to pulse.

"Boat," she muttered. Her head was aching now. With the cold? _Can't go down. Can't go up. Can't stay. Got to use the boat._

The dead thing was back there, still and lifeless. It hadn't moved, had it? She turned, but nothing had changed. The island, the corpse, the crushed lichen beneath her feet. The silence of the lake, the air. She couldn't feel her fingers.

She had to do something.

"Boat," she said, and her voice echoed from the ceiling, the water, the rock.

She pushed the boat out onto the water with a foot, and then nearly went headfirst into the lake anyway as she tried to get in it. It was almost too small for her, and barely afloat, rocking precariously as she tried to adjust her weight. There weren't any oars.

She looked at the ring in her hand, in the dark only a faint shape against her skin.

The boat was drifting. From below, from the depths of the lake, came tiny, drifting flecks of luminescence, white and green and hungry, circling the boat like the few remaining stars still alive in a dead galaxy, where the only noise was the movement of water and the susurrus of her own breath.

Without warning, the bottom scraped stone. She almost overturned the boat, felt her balance beginning to give way, and lunged. An ungainly jerk, her legs splashing up to the knees into water again, the soles of her feet finding slick, slimy rock, and she was clambering awkwardly up a slight incline of stone, hands immediately coated with dust, crawling into a small, dry space, dragging her legs back out of the water.

Curled on her side on the stone, breathing harshly, she lay facing the water, pulse racing. The boat was drifting slowly out onto the water again, into the dark, and she could see nothing beyond it, not the island or anything, and then the boat was gone, too, straying back into the lightless black, taking its muck and smell with it, and here all she could smell was dirt and stone and silence.

Behind her, stretching away into the dark, was a narrow, empty space, a space through which the air was sluggishly, listlessly—_moving_.

_Out,_ she cried, in her head, _out. Out._

Her fingers tightened around the ring.

She pushed herself standing, leaning against the wall of the tunnel. For some reason she was thinking about Willow and the expression on Willow's face as she read aloud from a book. The image stayed with her as she staggered down the tunnel, needles of pain creeping up her legs as the feeling returned to them. Willow reading aloud from a book, and how was that connected to this? To here? To her, underground?

Willow's face, bright and smiling as she read.

Willow's face, white and distorted with pain as a snake slithered out of her mouth.

Willow's face, and her black, black eyes.

The tunnel seemed to go on and on and on. It sloped down, at first, but then started to rise, and then it climbed steeply, precipitously. She began to hurry, dodging bits of jagged stone and outcroppings of rock without noticing them, desperate with the heightening smells of fresh light and air. She hit a corner where the slope stopped, rounded it, leaped down another short incline, and took another corner. Here, she realized, it was much lighter than it had been only a few feet back, so light that she could see everything and easily now, as if she were already out, everything illuminated by a pale light like from dawn or twilight, and she rushed recklessly around the third corner.

The creature that turned to face her was large, filthy, and ugly. A big, disfigured thing, all knotted skin and flesh and hanks of tangled, dirty hair, it wore what looked like bits of armor, and was raising something over its head with sinewy one arm, a wide, eyes gleaming yellow, broken-teethed mouth stretching open—but that was all she saw before her free hand struck out, seized its knot-fleshed jaw, and wrenched its head brutally to the left with a terrible crack.

Howls and shrieks filled her ears.

The next few moments were a confusion of screams and teeth and blades and broken necks. She didn't think—she only _moved_, snapping and breaking and twisting savagely, the ring a circle of hot metal in her palm. Bodies charged at her—she thrust away corpses. Creatures, inhuman, the faces of monsters and abominations, rushing at her in the dark, biting and snarling and hot with life—

—and then she staggered, gasped, grinding to a halt, the right hand with the ring pressed against her chest, the left out and open and reaching for a throat that wasn't there, and she was standing in cold, gray light.

The doorway and the door itself were made of stone, huge blocks of hewn stone standing wide, and the door had been left shoved to one side. Through the opening spilled that leaden light, wintery and clean, filtering through tall, snow-covered trees and glinting off of the frosted ground.

She sucked in a breath of raw, frozen air, body afire with blood and violence and returning feeling, and that was when she realized she was naked.

Closed her eyes. Breathed. Opened them again.

Felt the ring throb through her fingers and against her breast.

"Willow," she said, eyes wide, "Willow."

But Willow's face was fading already, sinking into the water, and that strange feeling of anxiety, that vague panic, that sense of distance and numb, deadened flesh, was draining away, its cold grip burned away by the band of metal heating her skin.

She opened her hand and looked at the ring, small and golden.

—and closed her hand again, turning to go back inside.

The things she had killed were each one nothing she recognized. Deformed, repulsive creatures, things that put her in mind of the monsters that crawled through small dark places, the nightmares of children and mothers. There was something about the contorted bodies that seemed grotesque to her, and she felt no remorse at having killed them.

She felt nothing at all.

The cave behind the stone door was a crude, craggy hole, full of smoke and sputtering torches and the smell of spoiling meat. She scavenged through the trash and the corpses, and found that nearly everything was too disgusting to want to touch. Eventually, she managed to come up with a dirty but serviceable knife, wood-handled, and a bundle of ratty cloth that looked as if it could be a long, loose-stitched shirt beneath the grime. From one of the bodies she stripped a threadbare leather belt, the buckle of corroded iron, and then she left the cave, without looking back.

Outside, she crouched in the frost and washed as well as she could. By the time she'd wiped the worst of it off with handfuls of melting snow, her skin was blue and white again.

The cloth _was_ a shirt, poorly made of some kind of thick wool, and it was revolting. Pulling it on over her head was a trial by itself, but it was winter (_Is it supposed to be winter?_), she was naked, and there was nothing else. The belt she tied around her waist, the knife tucked against her hip, and then she stopped, still on a knee, and looked at the ring.

Turned it 'round and 'round in her fingers.

With her nails, she stripped a long fibril of leather from the belt. Twining it through the ring, she tied the loose ends at the back of her neck, and then tucked the ring beneath the shirt, where it lay, hot, against the skin.

She stood up. The sky had brightened as she worked, and now she could see the sun glimmering on the horizon straight ahead, through the trees. The ground sloped away downward from where she stood, the stone door open and silent behind her and a dirt path in front.

"Willow," she called, and her voice rang out on the cold air, a high, girlish voice, like that of a lost child, and died on the wind.

A hand on the knife hilt, she began walking down the path.


	2. Chapter 2

Sylfaen

Disclaimer: Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Lord of the Rings belong to their respective creators, Joss Whedon and J.R.R. Tolkien.

The man stood in front of the door of a wooden house, an axe in his hands.

She stood in the grass, maybe thirty feet or so away, and tried to decide whether or not to pull her knife.

He was...tall. Seven feet, maybe eight, taller than anyone she had ever seen before. Thick black hair and a large black beard, and a huge, broad body, all muscle and knotted sinew, the legs dark tree trunks. Splinters and chips of wood were scattered in his hair, and his skin glistened with sweat from the chopping he had been doing. He wore a kind of folded loincloth and had boots on his feet, but was otherwise naked. She could see the shirt he had stripped off earlier, lying folded in the grass beside the door.

They stood, each as still as stone, in the low, golden light, and watched each other think of killing and not killing.

His eyes were a darkest, feral brown.

He made a noise, _hmmm_, under his breath, in a voice that growled without baring teeth.

She backed away cautiously, watchful, her posture that of a waiting wolf.

The man opened his mouth, and he said a few words, in a tone that was almost impatient.

She could understand nothing.

When she only stared at him blankly, the man's brows came together. He glared at her, and spoke again, this time at length.

Nothing. She heard gibberish, and shook her head to show that she didn't understand.

_Hmmm,_ he growled.

She looked back the way she had come, back to the trees, wondering whether to disappear back into them, to take her chances.

When she turned back again, the giant had moved aside from the door.

He stood by the huge tree trunk he had been cutting, the head of the axe resting on the ground, his hands on the butt of the handle. His eyes were frank, and forthright—_come in, if you want,_ they seemed to say. _Or go, as you like._

The ring lay still and quiet against her breast, and from those eyes she recognized the offer for what it was.

She slipped by him and to the door, keeping an eye on the man where he stood. He made no move to stop her or come after her, and when she'd gone inside, pausing by the door frame, she heard the bite of the axe again, the chop of splitting wood.

The hall she had come into was large, both wide and long, and in the middle was a fireplace where a wood-fire burned. On each side, there were raised platforms between hall pillars and the walls, and in one corner of the left platform there was bedding laid out, a pile of blankets. Smoke blackened the ceiling, seeping through an opening higher up through the rafters, and in the opposite wall there was another, smaller door, through which she could smell flowers and sunlight.

From beside a long table in front of the fire, a gray dog raised its head and woofed in her direction.

She limped down the hall, toward the bedding, and was unconscious before her body hit a mattress filled with straw.

At some point, she was, in some part of her sleeping mind, aware of the dog padding over and lying down beside her, laying his head in the small of her back. She was aware of the man coming in, later, using the shirt he'd taken off to wipe his face and neck, the axe nowhere to be seen, and she knew it when he stood by the fire, looking at her for several long moments with a glowering frown on his face. She knew it when he went away again, leaving the hall, and she knew it when the fire began to die down, darkening the room, but her body ached and was wrung out with exhaustion, and she couldn't bear to open her eyes or get up, not even when the ring grew hot and almost painful where it was pressing into her collarbone.

When she finally, finally woke, the sun had set, the hall was dark, and the dog was gone.

She lay still for a while, trying to get her bearings. Something smelled awful, and she was embarrassed to realize that it was her. Oh—the bedding would be dirty too, now.

_Bath, _she thought, but she still didn't get up.

Something pulsed against her neck. She took the ring in her hand, held it up to her face. The gleam of gold was warm and lovely in the dark, and she shivered though she wasn't cold, shivered as if someone had whispered into her ear.

"Ring," she said, and, on impulse, slipped it onto her left ring finger.

And sighed, eyes half-closed—

—as _something_,as voices on voices in voices crawled along her skin—clutching at her, dragging at her, pulling her down, down, down into the cold—

—and the beast that was her own self screamed through her blood, her body, a fire against a fire—

—and _power_ filled her flesh with a golden, living fire.

She stood in the door of the wooden house and looked on a world without life. The moon and the sun hung in the sky, a man pursuing a woman through the heavens, their eyes blinded, full of their own light. Below the earth slept dragons and beasts, and in the trees hung the contorted shapes of ghosts and men. She saw corruption as a black thing winging away into the distance, and she saw the light for what it was, a weak and aged thing, fading away into the west, and when she looked to the east, where darkness crept, swollen and malignant with all its years of fermented poison, she saw the colossus, the cyclopean eye that hung its shadow over the world, and she saw its fear as it threw its sight out into the world, desperate and searching and unable to see.

Unable to see, as the beast coiled around her heart opened its jagged mouth and swallowed whole a ring of fire.

The fire filled her body, her head, and she burned, screaming and screaming and screaming, until she had burned to nothing, and there was no pain.

From the trees, out of the dark, came a huge, black shape, crashing through the wood. A black bear, larger than could fit into the world, eyes red with madness, and it bellowed its rage, howled its pain, before, trembling, it came to lie quietly down at her charred and blackened feet.

She opened her eyes.

The hall was quiet. The fire had gone out, and pale light limned the edges of the two doors at each end of the room, the light of morning. All was gray and still.

Beside her sat the giant, in shirt and trews, smelling of the woods and fur and teeth.

His eyes, in the dark, gleamed yellow.

She sat up in the bedding.

He stared at her, through her. The muscles of his neck were tense and tight, strained almost to breaking. The knuckles of his hands were white as he gripped his knees, holding them as a man would hold his weapons in fear.

His face was flat and naked with anger.

"What have you done?" he said, and the growl was a rasp.

She said nothing.

He turned away, and his shoulders loosened, his head lowered. Something inexpressible passed through his body, a body that slanted, grudging, toward the floor, and in the shape of it she recognized something broken and defeated.

"I am Beorn," he said, eyes on the cold, black fireplace, "and I was a free man."

Looked at her, again, a look of hatred and loathing and lust and regret.

"Willow," she said, and didn't know why.

His mouth formed the shape of it. _Willow_.

"Willow," he said, and she felt the power of it, her power over him to make him speak her name, and his power when he named her.

"Look what you have done," he whispered, and his voice was low and terrible with despair.

She went out behind the wooden house, and washed in a stream there, feeling his eyes on her naked back. She dressed in clothes Beorn gave her, clothes too large but well-made, shirt and trews of soft wool dyed green. She took the knife he gave her, larger and sharper than the one she'd had, the new belt and pouch, and a gray cloak. There were no boots, but he gave her furs with which to wrap her feet, soft and muting. She ate bread and honey and drank milk at the table while he took the old things to the fireplace and burned them, a small fire that he let die as soon as the task was done.

She watched him open the doors and the gates, and leave them open, though for who she could not see and he did not say.

When Willow left the house, her face turned east for the road but her eyes looking south, the ring gold and glimmering on her finger, Beorn came with her, the black-haired and -bearded giant, a war axe on his shoulder, in a coat of chain and a cloak of black fur.


End file.
